San Diego woman turns 105

Mabel Heitz, at right, celebrates her 105th birthday at Kearny Mesa Convalescent Hospital. She looks at a photo of herself taken when she was in her early 20s that's held by her daughter, Jan Magot.
— Charlie Neuman

Mabel Heitz, at right, celebrates her 105th birthday at Kearny Mesa Convalescent Hospital. She looks at a photo of herself taken when she was in her early 20s that's held by her daughter, Jan Magot.
— Charlie Neuman

San Diego  Mabel Heitz has often been the life of the party. She was still doing cartwheels and riding roller coasters into her late 80s, still driving a car when she was 97.

Nobody who knows her was surprised Saturday afternoon when she got a piece of cake for her 105th birthday and ate all the frosting first. And then had seconds.

“Moderation in everything except for fun — that’s grandma,” said Dawn Magot, who was among those celebrating with Mabel at the Kearny Mesa Convalescent Hospital.

It was a quiet affair, about 15 family members and friends sitting in the hospital’s courtyard eating cake, telling stories, and passing around photos of Mabel when she was younger.

“The good old days,” said Mabel, who was wearing a paper “Happy Birthday” tiara for the occasion.

Mabel Heitz, at far right, who is celebrating her 105th. birthday here at Kearny Mesa Convalescent Hospital & Nursing Home, looks to the crowd at her birthday party. With her close is her daughter Jan Magot. Clapping her hands is Elsa Lopez, a facility staff nurse.
— Charlie Neuman

Mabel Heitz, at far right, who is celebrating her 105th. birthday here at Kearny Mesa Convalescent Hospital & Nursing Home, looks to the crowd at her birthday party. With her close is her daughter Jan Magot. Clapping her hands is Elsa Lopez, a facility staff nurse.
— Charlie Neuman

Centenarians aren’t that unusual anymore; the 2010 U.S. Census listed more than 53,000 Americans over the age of 100. Gerontology researchers only start keeping track at 110, the so-called supercentenarians, of which there were 76 worldwide at last count, 73 of them female.

Still, 105 is an eyebrow-raising number, and it makes her the oldest resident at the Kearny Mesa facility and among the oldest in San Diego County. Born at a time when the average life span for females was about 53, she attributes her longevity to staying busy and an affectionate family.

And maybe this, a piece of advice she’s been known to pass along to loved ones: “Always wear clean underwear.”

Her parents were Swedish immigrants who met on a ship coming to America and settled in Chicago. He was a carpenter, she was a maid. Mabel was one of six children.

One day when she was about 12, she was crossing the street and her coat got caught on the bumper of a car turning the corner. She was dragged three blocks. “I could have died,” she’s said repeatedly over the years, an explanation for the live-now attitude that took hold in her.

She met her future husband, Harry, on a blind double-date arranged by her best friend. All the way home, in the back seat, she sat on Harry’s lap and they kissed. “Don’t you do that,” Mabel warned her granddaughter years later. “Oh, go ahead. It was fun.”

Harry and Mabel went out for about five years. He was hesitant to pop the question because life during the Great Depression made everything seem so uncertain. Then she shocked him into action. “Marry me now or lose me forever.”

He worked in a bank and she was a homemaker who sewed her own dresses and was so good at baking that when relatives needed a cake for a special occasion they’d call her. The couple had two children, a son, Ronald, who is 79 and lives in Chicago, and a daughter, Jan, 71, who lives in Pacific Beach. Both were at Mabel’s birthday party Saturday.

Harry died in 1979. Theirs had been the kind of marriage where he always took care of the financial affairs. Mabel wasn’t sure she could do all that, but she did — even assumed his duties as head of the homeowner’s association at the condo complex where they lived in Pacific Beach.